CTO at Firmhouse. Please consider the environment before running your business. Join the club.
Rotterdam, Nederland
Joined September 2007
- Tweets30.2K
- Following903
- Followers1.1K
- Likes12K
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
Million dollar opportunity is to work directly with small to medium sized businesses pen-testing, then selling them contracts to keep them safe
Shocking number of vulnerabilities are open to even “novice” ethical hackers, and is a very positive sum type of opportunity
Economics around this are drastically different than they were just ~6 months ago and an entirely new business model is opened up
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
Grok Bot integrated with HEY and Obsidian has made my life qualitatively better. What used to be routine toil is now just one natural-language request away.
For example: “Let the school know Julia won't be coming in today” or “Request compensation for that canceled flight back to Madrid.”
Behind the scenes, that might mean finding a Google Form buried in a PDF attached to an old school email, filling it out, and submitting it. Or navigating Iberia's convoluted website and forms. All handled automatically.
I also love how seamlessly it integrates multiple instances. You can run it on different computers, each with access to its own local disks, while sharing the integrations configured on the cloud instance associated with your account. And you can access them all from your phone.
Thanks to @jasonfried and @jasonzimdars for the strong endorsement. Two Jasons whose product advice is well worth taking.
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
If you haven't accepted that these things are smarter than you, even in your own domain of expertise, I'm sorry. And if you have, but still believe you should be making all the meaty calls in that domain, I'm sorry too. Both are hard pills to swallow.
Many saw this coming earlier, but the turning point for me was the Fable/Astra generation. Until then, I was in a comfortable sweet spot: an expert who still knew better, but who could leverage the amazing acceleration agents brought.
After that, well, once reality sank in, embracing it wasn't that hard. Suddenly, you're in a whole new greenfield where anything feels possible, and your experience gives you a head start.
I think this click moment will come for everyone. Some have already had it, and many others haven't yet. But reality catches up, sooner or later.
And remember, Fable/Astra will be rusty, outdated models tomorrow. Keep that in mind when placing your bets.
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
"My colleague pushed code that doesn't match what I had in mind."
How bad is that really? Consider: it's now much faster and easier to change code.
Years ago a wrong decision could cause days and weeks of refactoring.
Now? Probably less. Adjust.
Turning creative thoughts into result was always the thing at the abstract level
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) reacts to Marc Andreessen's (@pmarca) prediction that the last job standing will be a VC:
“Sadly, I think he's right.”
“I wouldn't say venture capitalist. I would say capital allocator, because what you do as an engineer is you're allocating tokens. And we all have the same wall clock time.”
“None of us, to my knowledge, can distort time.”
“We all have the same clock running & we have to invent, create, do good for the world, & now we have this superpower of tokens.”
💯
We forgot we already solved agent permissions.
Everyone’s wringing their hands about how much access to give an AI agent.
My agent asked for my bank login to write an investor update. I gave it a read-only bookkeeper account instead. Also gave it a credit card with a $100 limit.
Treat the agent like a digital human. Give it the same rights, permissions, and restrictions you’d give a person you trust with a specific task.
We already have all the guardrails.
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
it’s a bit weird because a single post here, reframing your product in a new way, can forever change the trajectory of your life
you can just talk about something you already built, in a new compelling way, and your life changes
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
Just read about ~150 investor update emails this morning. Before my context window compresses …
… here's what the best startups do after the YC batch:
- Focus on growth. 'if grew last month, do , else try ' This algorithm is simplified, but you get the idea.
- Have a through line month-to-month. Good founders reflect, push, learn constantly. Bad is when every update reads like a totally new set of goals/ideas.
- Write company updates in the first place!
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
.@alexandr_wang says modern product marketing is now all driven by the screenshot:
“To have a modern consumer product, it has to work on the screenshot. The screenshot has to fly, either through group chats or word of mouth or online.”
“Having Jolly in the screenshot immediately communicates this is a Muse screenshot.”
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
People on X are overestimating how quickly consumer habits change.
I chatted with a startup building AI sales agents for D2C stores. They said fewer than 5% of shoppers interact with their agent, up from under 2% a year ago.
Adoption is growing, but there’s still a long way to go.
Having worked on Muse, I believe widespread agentic AI adoption is going to go slower than we think. The people who build it, and the investors who fund it are all on the upper end of conscientiousness and openness to new experience. It's a problem that we often project this on to the general population, but most people are people of habit and aren't really readily open to trying new things.
I remember even as early as 10 years ago, we'd still jokingly pass around lmgtfy.com/ bc the habit of Googling something wasn't quite ubiquitous yet.
I think that AI, like many other things in consumer, will fall into generation gaps. It may be another 10-20 years before we see wide spread consumer AI adoption as gen A and gen beta come into age.
Don't get me wrong, I still think there is hundreds of billions to be made in agentic AI, but it's not going to be the form factor we're seeing. At the end of the day, people really just care about things that impact them directly, and impact them positively without them having to expend any effort on their end.
Agentic AI is going to have dramatic impact on healthcare, housing and labor long before the end consumer is going to care about agentic AI.
You need to up your intensity (and be happy with that) don’t watch your agent finish its turn. Start 5 other ones in parallel. Or write/do something else while you’re waiting.
The days of single threaded humans are over.
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
Alexandr Wang says big companies have a "smoothie problem."
Every PM pushes in a feature, every vision gets blended, and users can taste it. He says it's now happening inside AI labs too.
How Muse avoided it:
1. Under 200 people for Meta's biggest launch of the year.
2. A team kept small on purpose.
3. One point of view: the taste of Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO.
The other 8 rules here:
productmarketfit.tech/p/wang…
Michiel Sikkes retweeted
🧊 Cold Puma workers can cause serious request backlogs after a Rails deployment. A Basecamp case study on preloading authenticated requests, sharing memory through copy-on-write, and reducing startup latency. #Rails dev.37signals.com/warming-up…
💯
It's been a rapid progression from supervising agents' work to figuring out how to get out of their way.
It's the new Mythical Man-Month. We have unlimited effort at our disposal, but the challenge is providing enough direction, context, and verification without becoming the bottleneck.
There's a new version of this post
